Styling plots for publication with matplotlib

For the past few years my go-to environment for putting together data
visualizations has been an iPython notebook (now Jupyter
notebook) loaded up with the %matplotlib inline
magic. It's great for iterating through revisions of a plot for whatever
presentation or manuscript I'm preparing. Eventually, some of these plots make it
into a manuscript and matplotlib provides the tools to make them publication-quality.

I've put together a jupyter notebook outlining a few of the common plot types
I find myself routinely assembling as well as some of the styling I regularly use.

You can find this notebook in my notebooks repo
or rendered in HTML here: